Abstract
This aricle proposes a revision of ideas about postmodern historical fiction through a detailed analysis of Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter. While postmodern fiction has sometimes been understood to entail a radical rejection of history, it has in fact been generally reformist in approach. These novels have focused on articulating the imbrication of historiography in narrative practices while remaining remarkably invested in producing accurate representations of the past. When postmodern historical fiction does reject history, as is the case with Coming Through Slaughter, it does so as an otology rather than as a discursive practice. Ondaatje suggests that Charles 'Buddy' Bolden sought to escape the isolating certainties of being within history that had accompanied his fame as a musician. The novel then frames itself as a response to the posthumous threat faced by Bolden as jazz histories are being constructed. I argue that Ondaatje's imperious and ethically questionable identification with Bolden is transvalued by the text as an act of posthumous aesthetic rescue from historicity itself. I close by suggesting that the conflation of radically disparate histories also occurs under the auspices of concepts of traumatic and sublime history among contemporary theorists. All pose serious ethical dangers insofar as they erase the historical and personal specificity of suffering.